All at sea

In 1945 there were 900 ships in the Royal Navy. Today the number of destroyers, frigates and aircraft carriers stands at 36. As four more look set to be broken up, traditionalists wonder what Nelson would have said. But, asks James Meek, do we really need a navy at all?

Genetically, if in no other sense, Nicholas Soames is 25% Winston Churchill. Unlike his grandfather, however, the Tory politician and former hussar has yet to be entrusted with sufficient responsibility to have his name associated with a great British naval disaster or expansion. But, as Michael Howard's defence spokesman, he has been trying. A couple of weeks ago he said that the government would be committing an act of "lunacy" if, as expected, it decided to mothball four destroyers. If the cuts were made, it was reported gravely by the papers that carried the story, the Royal Navy would, for the first time in 300 years, have fewer surface ships than the French navy.

The complete lack of panic on Britain's south coast with which this revelation was greeted can be explained in several ways. One is that Napoleon is dead, and we no longer see the French navy as a threat; naval parity with France, as an electoral platform, is too recherche even for the Conservative party. Another is that the ships concerned were designed when Soames - now 54 - was a teenager, and proved their fallibility in the Falklands decades ago, when two of them were destroyed by the Argentinians. A third is that we still have more submarines than they do, so war with France remains an option, should a future Tory administration deem this appropriate.

These are difficult times for lovers of the idea of a big Royal Navy - the 900 major ships of 1945 or the 950-ship fleet of 1805, the year of Trafalgar. Now there are only 36 left, not counting submarines and minehunters. Nostalgists can go to the cinema and enter the enchanted maritime kingdom of Master And Commander: Far Side Of The World. They can yearn for an era when Britain was respected on the high seas, when Russell Crowe-like heroes wore powdered wigs and prepubescent midshipmen had their arms amputated without anaesthetic. Then they can come out into the drizzle over Devonport, see the few grey hulls in the water, and wonder not only at the inexorable shrinking of the fleet, but the indifference of the general public to whether the navy is big or small - or even, Nelson forbid, to whether Britain, the island nation, has a navy at all.

Psychologically, the British have been in retreat from the sea for generations. The oceans which once were our highways to the world, doors to adventure and wealth, have come to be associated with economic decline and restriction. The Royal Navy couldn't prevent the empire dissolving. The Falklands were only won back at an enormous cost in blood and money. The navy couldn't stop the British merchant fleet, or the British fishing fleet, shrinking to shadows of their former selves. It couldn't even protect trawlers against the gunboats of Iceland - a country that has no defence budget. The great transoceanic journeys which young imperialists and colonists once made are still being carried out by their British descendants, but by air, not water. As the French raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, the cross-Channel ferries and their loads of booze-cruisers may even fade away.

The last great justification for a powerful, traditional Royal Navy was the Soviet threat: shoals of nuclear-powered attack submarines poised to pour out of the Barents Sea into the Atlantic in the 70s and 80s, threatening to strangle the maritime supply routes on which Britain is still dependent for food and raw materials. That threat has vanished. From being on the front line of the cold war, north-western Europe has become, militarily, one of the world's quietest, safest and most peaceful cul-de-sacs.

Shortly before resigning his commission, in an article in the latest edition of Prospect magazine, a 34-year-old Navy lieutenant, Lewis Page, wrote a valedictory essay ridiculing the Navy's obsession with maintaining large numbers of expensive grey-hulled warships - frigates and destroyers - as if the imaginary battles of the cold war, against scores of Soviet nuclear submarines and armadas of Soviet naval aircraft, were still ever likely to be fought. If Britain wanted a navy for the real world, he said, it needed a variety of aircraft carriers, submarines, and not much else. "The British taxpayer is forking out immense sums to run warships whose only real use is as venues for diplomatic cocktail parties," Page writes.

"There is no ... requirement whatever for our dozens of toothless, pricey frigates, or our current long-obsolete destroyers. We would lose no significant capability by decommissioning them all right now."

The events of the past few years may have given armed forces in the west a new raison d'etre, but for conventional navies they have not been so happy. In October 2000, a US destroyer, the Cole, was taking on fuel in Yemen. The ship could hardly have been better armed: anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-missile missiles, anti-submarine torpedoes, guns of all calibres and enough cruise missiles to take down a small city. It was attacked by terrorists in a small launch laden with explosives. They killed 17 crew and almost sank the destroyer. The first post-September 11 war was in Afghanistan, a landlocked country. The second was in Iraq, a near-landlocked country whose navy was almost non-existent.

In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon carried out an elaborate war game to test, among other things, its naval operations against a dummy Saddam. The role of the dictator was played with consummate skill by a retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, who sent a swarm of small boats against a US aircraft carrier battlegroup in the confined spaces of the Gulf, savaging the fleet and sinking a carrier. He was ordered to play fair and quit the war game in disgust. In the event, Saddam did not play himself as effectively as Van Riper had, but the point was chillingly made.

Years before the attack on the Cole, a debate was under way in the US about the kind of ships the US Navy should be investing in. In the late 1990s the then director of America's Naval War College, Vice-Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, startled his colleagues with a suggestion that an entirely new type of ship needed to be built. He called it the "Streetfighter". The idea was that, while the big ships stayed safely away from the shallow, bad guy-infested "brown water" areas off the coast of countries designated dodgy, these small, nimble vessels would bridge the gap between coastline and deep water.

The idea has yet to be taken up, but Cebrowski has. He is now the head of Donald Rumsfeld's pet, the Office of Force Transformation, where he is the high priest of the defence secretary's religion that the military needs to be smart, light and nimble rather than massive, slow and heavy.

Cebrowski, a former US Navy fighter pilot, preaches his gospel in the bizarre language of the vast US military bureaucracy, with Delphic touches of his own that make him sound like a cross between a New Labour visionary, a Zen master and Darth Vader. Here, in a recent conference speech, is the voice of the man whose thinking is driving the future of American defence policy, which inevitably drags the Royal Navy along in its wake: "The Transaction Strategy rests on the management of four key flows between the Non-Integrating Gap and the Functioning Core."

But not everything he says is geopolitical gobbledygook for top brass, and he is closely listened to in Whitehall. His essential message is that you don't need lots of ships or tanks or planes, as long as the ships and tanks and planes you do have are able to communicate with each other and share information. You don't have so many individual platforms - ships - you have a network of ships.

"This is about human behaviour," he says. "Remember that to network is a verb. A platform is a noun. So when we shift from being platform centric to network centric we shift from focusing on things to focusing on behaviour or action. That is where we find the power ... what we are really talking about is a new theory of war because we are talking about new sources of power.

"The United States Air Force talks about being able to destroy a target using only one bomb where it used to take 1,000 bombs. If you look at the difference between the thousand and the one and how it is done, the only difference is the IT. You have a thousand-to-one substitution of information for mass."

Professor Geoffrey Till, director of academic studies at Britain's Joint Services Command and Staff College, explains the relevance to the Royal Navy. "Ship numbers and platforms are not the real point," he says. "It's capability. The UK is now a much smaller player than in 1914 or 1939, but it is still quite a significant player and is doing quite a bit better than you might have thought in view of those crude calculations."

He is a believer in the value of big surface ships: more and more nations are acquiring them, and venturing further into blue water, he points out. But he concedes that the only reason for Britain to have them today is to take part in military operations far beyond our shores. "The alternative would be to define defence much more narrowly, and to go back to the old days of thinking about the defence of maritime borders, and to defend them against drugs and illegal fishing. In which case you'd go for a coastguard-type thing."

If money and effectiveness were the only issues, Britain would long ago have pooled its ships, crews and bases into a European navy. If you add up the cumulative defence budgets of all the EU countries, they come to more than half that of the US, yet because the European countries, down to Belgium and Denmark, fritter it away on their own little navies, Europe only has one full-sized aircraft carrier (it's French) against 12 in the US. Yet there seems to be an acceptance that even baby steps towards a Euronavy are politically and emotionally impossible for any British government for the foreseeable future. Equally unlikely is the other radical yet rational thought of taking British dependence on the US to its logical conclusion and paying Washington a few billion a year to run a slightly larger navy on our behalf. There are too many military patriots on the right and, though they would hate to admit it, on the left, and politicians and news editors value too highly that obscure chemical rush men of a certain age receive at the sight of an aircraft carrier ploughing through the waves with their country's flag on it.

Which leaves the Royal Navy steaming towards its numerically diminished yet extraordinarily powerful future of new aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, destroyers and submarines, together with a power that Horatio Nelson would never have dreamed of and might not have relished - the ability, from a Trident submarine, to lay a whole continent to waste. The almost unique ability of the Royal Navy to fit into US military operations - "plug and play", as Till puts it - has dangers. An organisation that acquires a particular skill for a particular task may find itself dragged into other tasks where, without that acquired skill, the question of its participation would never have arisen. That's a troubling thought when the Pentagon's naval planners are looking forward beyond the current troubles to the developing naval arms race in East Asia.

"When a crisis emerges in which the US wants a coalition, they will come to Britain and see what we have to offer," says Professor Malcolm Chalmers, of Bradford University's Peace Studies department. "If we haven't got something to offer, they won't blame us for not having it. But if we have got something to offer, and we don't give it, they won't be happy."